Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick reads 'A Little Princess', Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1905 story of Sara Crewe, who's both a princess and a pauper.

Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfare.There are very few works of modern literature that successfully manage to link the possession of a large fortune to an equally healthy moral compass — and fewer still that go ahead and make the correlation causative. Smoldering Mr. Darcy, whose just management of household wealth finally manages to earn the respect of Elizabeth Bennett (who then gets to live in that house!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) is rare standout amidst craven strivers like Becky Sharp or the hapless Hulots, who handle money as skillfully as a greased hand negotiates an egg. It's unworthy moneygrubbers who esteem Darcy for his money. Wiser personages, from his housekeeper to his dearest friend, esteem him for his money management. But in the wealthy, intensely bookwormish Sara Crewe, author Frances Hodgson Burnett — who earlier, we determined, had a rather poisonous view of the spoils of empire — creates a character whose goodness not only equals her good fortune, but brings her fortune itself. (And ermine!) Sara, like The Secret Garden's Mary Lennox, is a young girl brought up in Colonial India, but unlike Mary, she's bright, inquisitive, and the daughter of a young, wealthy officer who adores her completely. (Her mother has been dead for many years.) As the novel commences, he's bringing her to London to enroll her in a fancy girls' school (run by the odious, aptly named Miss Minchin, about whom we could write several essays alone), and you will forgive me for disgressing immediately into the wardrobe her provides her for her entry into formal schooling:

There were velvet dressed trimmed with costly furs, and lace dresses, and embroidered ones, and hats with great, soft ostrich feathers, and ermine coats and muffs, and boxes of tiny gloves and handkerchiefs and silk stockings in such abundant supplies that the polite young women behind the counters whispered to each other that the odd little girl with the big, solumn eyes must be at least some foreign princess—perhaps the little daughter of an Indian rajah.

Phew! Clothing porn, out of the way. At the school, Sara is distinguished from the other well-to-do girls not only by trouncing whatever finery they have with her epic wardrobe, private playroom and French maid, but by subtler characteristics — her strange, compelling looks, her love of books, her ability to speak French, her warm, empathetic nature, and most of all, by her strong sense of fancy, which is regarded at turns as charming, immature, eccentric, and, to her likable, slightly thick friend Emengarde, as simply miraculous:

"Yes," Sara answered. "...when I play I make up stories and tell them to myself...." ...Emengarde stopped short, staring, and quite losing her breath. "You make up stories!" she gasped. "Can you do that—as well as speak French? Can you?" Sara looked at her in simple surprise. "Why, anyone can make up things," she said...Have you never pretended things?" "No," said Ermengarde. "Never. I—tell me about it."

Sara's ability to tell stories doesn't only prove a powerful attraction to the other girls in the school, who love to gather around to hear her make things up by the fire. (Ah yes, that crackling, Colonial-India-financed grate!!!!!! Crumpets and tea and melted butter, oh my!) More important, musing on her own circumstances rather than smugly accepting them allows her to truly — which is to say, cynically — speculate that much of her good nature may result only from private financing:

Sara was praised for her quickness at her lessons, for her good manners, for her amiability to her fellow-pupils, for her generosity if she gave sixpence to a beggar out of her full little purse; the simplest thing she did was treated as if it were a virtue, and if she had not had a disposition and a clever little brain, she might have been a very self-satisfied young person. But the clever little brain told her a great many sensible and true things about herself and her circumstances, and now and then she talked these things over to Ermengarde as time went on: "Things happen to people by accident," she used to say. "A lot of nice accidents happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me anything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don't know"—looking quite serious—"how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I'm a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials."

OOOOOOOOOOO, WAS THAT A DARE? I think that was a dare!!!!! Poor child, she will need that imagination, and the ability to be rather dispassionate, in just a moment, for Sara is about to find out, in the midst of a lavish birthday party with "lace collars and silk stockings and handkerchiefs; there was a jewel-case containing a necklace and tiara which looked quite as if they were made of real diamonds"—ALMOST DONE—"there was a long sealskin and muff; there were ball dresses and walking dresses and visiting dresses;"—DID I MENTION THIS WAS FOR A DOLL?—"there were hats and tea-gowns and fans"....phew. Where was I? Ah, yes. The terrible news, which is that not only is Captain Crewe dead of brain fever in the jungle, but that his entire fortune is gone, invested a friend's diamond-mine venture that's gone smash. Shockingly enough, this does not go over well with Miss Michin:

"Where is Sara Crewe?" Miss Amelia was bewildered. "Sara!" she stammered. "Why, she's with the children in your room, of course." "Has she a black frock in her sumptuous wardrobe?"—in bitter irony. "A black frock?" Miss Amelia stammered again. "A black one?" "She has frocks of every other color. Has she a black one?" Miss Amelia began to turn pale. "No—ye-es!" she said. "But it is too short for her. She has only the black velvet, and she has outgrown it." "Go ahead and tell her to take off that preposterous pink silk gauze, and put the black one on, whether it is too short or not. She has done with finery!" Then Miss Amelia began to wring her fat hands and cry. "Oh, sister!" she sniffed. "Oh, sister! What can have happened?" Miss Minchin wasted no words. "Captain Crewe is dead," she said. "He has died without a penny. That spoiled, pampered, fanciful child is left a pauper on my hands."

So the same girl who, only weeks earlier, befriended the downtrodden, housemaid Becky by telling her, "...we are just the same—I am only a little girl like you. It's just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!" now finds that she totally has to eat those words. While Miss Minchin does not quite reduce Sara to the Becky's level of wretchedness (Minchin's earlier verdict: "Becky is the scullery-maid. Scullery-maids—er—are not little girls") she puts Sara to work immediately, banishing her to live in the attic along with Becky, where she listens to rats scurry by night and by day, tutors the children in French, runs horrible errands, and is generally plagued by anyone with the authority to plague her. Still, Sara has finds that her ability to imagine, which gave her the ability to be compassionate to people like Becky in her flush days, now gives her the ability to muddle through. Looking around her bare quarters ("It's a good place to imagine in," she laughs bitterly), she does a quick Changing Rooms:

"You see," she said, "there could be a thick, soft blue Indian rug on the floor; and in that corner there could be a soft little sofa, with cushions to curl up on; and just over it could be a shelf full of books so that one could reach them easily; and there could be a fur rug before the fire, and hangins on the wall to cover up the whitewash, and pictures. They would have to be little ones, but they could be beautiful; and there could be a lamp with a deep rose-colored shade; and a table in the middle, with things to have tea with; and a little fat copper kettle singing on the hob; and the bed could be quite different. It could be made soft and covered with a lovely silk coverlet. It could be beautiful. And perhaps we could coax the sparrows until we made such friends with them that they would come and peck at the window and ask to be let in."

You said...a rose-colored lamp? Hold that thought Sara also engineers other flights of fancy to make her life bearable, like that she and Becky are in the Bastille or that she's a soldier who must tramp through mud on her way to pick up meat for the cook. But the one that sticks the most is a fancy she's always had—that she's a princess. Not the kind who lives among riches in a tower, but the kind whose quiet, polite bearing gives her power even when she's reduced, like in the classic fairy tale, to horrid circumstances. Knowing she's secretly a princess allows Sara to stand all of the abuse heaped on her by Miss Minchin and the other household, who seem determined to grind her face in her fall from wealth as much as they can. In fact, her imagination comes to mean life or death — because for the one brief moment she drops the charade that her doll, Emily, is her friend — one of her oldest and best games — she loses her faith entirely:

"I can't bear this," said the poor child, trembling. "I know I shall die. I'm cold; I'm wet; I'm starving to death. I've walked a thousand miles today, and they have done nothing but scold me from morning until night. And because I could not find that last thing the cook sent me for, they would not give me any supper. Some men laughed at me because my old shoes made me slip down in the mud. I'm covered with mud now. And they laughed. Do you hear?" "You are nothing but a doll!" she cried; "nothing but a doll-doll-doll! You care for nothing. You are stuffed with sawdust. You never had a heart. Nothing could make you feel. You are a doll!"

But luckily, in a stroke up luck, a man from India, very wealthy, and very ill, moves in next door, and Sarah is swept up in another tide of "supposing" about the mysterious gentleman that distracts her entirely from her rough circumstances, and reminds her again of how bizarrely her life has altered from the days when she herself was salaamed. Fueled by a rooftop friendship with the Indian man's attendant and his monkey, she is able to continue to imagine herself out of misery. In one of my favorite, most bun-like scenes in literature, Sarah trudges through the winter night, aching with hunger, and finds and four-pence. Though she's starving herself, she stands by the princess code:

"Suppose I had dry clothes on," she thought. "Suppose I had good shoes and a long thick coat and merino stockings and a whole umbrella. And suppose—suppose—just when I was near a baker's where they sold hot buns, I should find sixpence—which belonged to nobody. Suppose, if I did, I should go into the shop buy six of the hottest buns and eat them all without stopping." ....it was actually a piece of silver—a tiny piece trodden upon by many feet, but still with spirit enough left to shine a little. Not quite a sixpence, but the next thing to it—a four-penny piece. ....and then if you believe me, she looked straight at the shop directly facing her. And it was a baker's shop, and a cheerful, stout, motherly woman with rosy cheeks was putting into the window a tray of delicious newly baked hot buns, fresh from the oven—large, plump shiny buns, with currants in them.

Sigh! Okay:

..."If I'm a princess," she was saying—"if I'm a princess—when they were poor and driven from their thrones—they always shared—with the populace—if they met one poorer and hungrier than themselves. They always shared. Buns are a penny each. If it had been sixpence I could have eaten six....." ...See," she said, putting the bun in the ragged lap, "this is nice and hot. Eat it, and you will not feel so hungry." The child started and stared up at her, as if such sudden, amazing good luck almost frightened her; then she snatched up the bun and began to cram it into her mouth with great wolfish bites. "Oh, my! Oh, my!" Sara heard her say hoarsely, in wild delight. "Oh, my!" Sara took out three more buns and put them down. The sound in the hoarse, ravenous voice was awful. "She is hungrier than I am," she said to herself. "She's starving." But her hand trembled when she put down the fourth bun. "I'm not starving," she said—and she put down the fifth.